This is the American worker's saga. The stuff you're making is getting cheaper. The stuff you need is getting more expensive. That's why you feel so squeezed. "That's a provocative idea," James Manyika tells me on the phone when I read through my theory. "I want to make a key point." The things getting more expensive fall into two categories, he said. You have the failures of productivity, including education, government, construction, and health care. Then you've got natural economic scarcity, like physical living space and crude oil.

"Health care is our most important failure of productivity," he says. "Many of the costs that go into health care are not open to competition. The nice thing about retail is that the costs are transparent. The management fees on your brokerage account are transparent and competitive and competed for. You don't know what the management costs for your health care plan are, because those are opaque. There's less incentive to make them cost effective. That's one reason why you've seen so few gains in health care productivity."

***

The presumption in Washington is that as long as we have a growing economy, everything will work out, and if productivity rises, jobs and wages will follow. It turns out that growth and productivity, while not at all evil, are not panaceas, either. GDP growth has been decoupled from job growth. Productivity has been decoupled from wages. What's good for work has been decoupled from what's good for workers.

"What can we do about that?" Manyika said at the end of our talk. I waited for him to say something. We're all still waiting.

via The Atlantic.

The Nigerian national who authorities say sneaked past layers of airport security and on to a Virgin America plane headed to Los Angeles is a Chicago-area businessman who claims to be a frequent traveler working for God. Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi, 24, also known as Seun Noibi, proclaims himself a "storyteller, strategist and designer who is passionate about reaching the world for Jesus," according to his Facebook page.

via latimes.com.

AS we drove toward the Punjabi Market — a densely packed collection of sari shops and Indian sweets stores south of downtown Vancouver — a local radio station helped get my husband, son and me primed for a weekend of Indian feasting. The winter sky was Windex blue and the air was near freezing, but inside the warm car, the speakers bounced with track after track of clubby Indian music.

This being Vancouver, however, just before we parked, the station switched over to a Mandarin talk show. Such a mashup of Asian cultures is par for the course in British Columbia's hub. Because of its huge Chinese immigrant population, Vancouver has earned its reputation as one of the continent's best places for Chinese food, but as with the radio station, that reputation can overshadow other faces of ethnic Vancouver.

On this visit, we had India on our minds. We set off to find innovative Indian food that strays beyond the boilerplate menus of butter chicken and lamb korma at so many Indian restaurants, in particular to see if the success of Vij's — the contemporary Indian restaurant that has become internationally famous — had spawned a modern-Indian movement, a kind of culinary parallel to the bhangra music I heard on that radio station.

Vancouver, with its vital mix of cultures, seems the perfect breeding ground for such cuisine. After all, Lizzie Collingham's insightful book "Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors" (Oxford University Press) reminds us that the food of India and its diasporas is at its core heterodox, influenced by the tastes of the Moguls, Portuguese, Chinese and British, who both distorted Indian food and globalized it. The first immigrants — almost all of them Sikh and Punjabi — arrived in British Columbia at the turn of the 20th century, after members of the empire's Indian troops had visited the area on their return trip from the Queen's 1887 Diamond Jubilee.

via NYTimes.com.

Vij's was a mixed bag: the appetizers were extraordinary, the entrees were surprisingly undistinguished.

Will check out Chutney Villa tonight.

later...

Chutney Villa was friendly, authentic, good but not exceptional.

via Bonkers World.

awesome.

Sitting on my couch were other adults in their 20s or early 30s who reported that they, too, suffered from depression and anxiety, had difficulty choosing or committing to a satisfying career path, struggled with relationships, and just generally felt a sense of emptiness or lack of purpose—yet they had little to quibble with about Mom or Dad. Instead, these patients talked about how much they “adored” their parents. Many called their parents their “best friends in the whole world,” and they’d say things like “My parents are always there for me.” Sometimes these same parents would even be funding their psychotherapy (not to mention their rent and car insurance), which left my patients feeling both guilty and utterly confused. After all, their biggest complaint was that they had nothing to complain about!

At first, I’ll admit, I was skeptical of their reports. Childhoods generally aren’t perfect—and if theirs had been, why would these people feel so lost and unsure of themselves? It went against everything I’d learned in my training.

But after working with these patients over time, I came to believe that no florid denial or distortion was going on. They truly did seem to have caring and loving parents, parents who gave them the freedom to “find themselves” and the encouragement to do anything they wanted in life. Parents who had driven carpools, and helped with homework each night, and intervened when there was a bully at school or a birthday invitation not received, and had gotten them tutors when they struggled in math, and music lessons when they expressed an interest in guitar (but let them quit when they lost that interest), and talked through their feelings when they broke the rules, instead of punishing them (“logical consequences” always stood in for punishment). In short, these were parents who had always been “attuned,” as we therapists like to say, and had made sure to guide my patients through any and all trials and tribulations of childhood. As an overwhelmed parent myself, I’d sit in session and secretly wonder how these fabulous parents had done it all.

Until, one day, another question occurred to me: Was it possible these parents had done too much?

via The Atlantic.